Jorja Smith was done with London. It was early 2021, about five years since the singer had left her home in Walsall at 18 to try to make it big in music. She hadn’t done badly: two Brit awards and Mercury prize and Grammy nominations followed her atmospheric 2018 debut album Lost & Found. But she was not all that happy. “I got really overwhelmed in London,” she says. “I realised it was the smallest thing: not being able to see the sky. Back home, bro, there’s trees everywhere, whereas here I felt trapped.”
She moved back to Walsall, where she is renting a cottage while waiting for builders to finish doing up a 400-year-old farmhouse she bought in 2019. With all due respect to the West Midlands market town, it is not where you tend to find young pop-R&B stars, let alone one with 3.7 million Instagram followers who has worked with Drake, Stormzy, FKA twigs, Burna Boy and Kendrick Lamar and walked in more than one fashion show. She now tends to split herself in two: there is Jorja, the performer (she uses air quotes the first time she speaks about herself like this, pastel talons swooping), and Jorja, the girl born down a quiet road of red-brick terraced houses.
She banished any second-album jitters by making the bulk of the forthcoming Falling or Flying with Walsall production duo DameDame*, both (anonymous) women, one of whom she has known since she was 15. She seems content. She is warm, quick to laugh and speaks in rapid sentences, jolting from one line of thought to the next before returning to her original point, sometimes by interrupting herself to ask: “What was I saying?” There are admissions of doubt and insecurity, but her unfiltered fizzy energy suggests a woman comfortable in who she is becoming: a person, she says, of extremes.
When we meet, she is early, sitting in her car outside a photo studio on a north London industrial estate and leaning over to smile at me from behind the wheel. She is here for this interview and then a shoot for a German magazine. It is a nerve-racking time when an artist sets out to heavily promote an album months before anyone can hear it, part of which involves playing the social media game.
When we last spoke, in 2017, she said she would post on Instagram, then close it without endlessly scrolling. What does she make of social media now? “I hate it,” she says – apart from TikTok, which is “a nice place. But Instagram … Someone else is doing my Instagram,” she says, now cross-legged on a sofa in a secondhand Nike T-shirt. “Sometimes, I’ll wish I gave myself a different artist name or something, so at least I could detach myself.” Using her real name for work has made it harder to separate herself from any negative comments. It also means she saw the recent wave of online commentary about her weight, enough of it for her to trend on Twitter for two days.
Unprompted, she starts to talk about it. “It’s funny, my friend said: ‘I thought you didn’t read comments?’ And I was like” – she puts on a faux-whiney voice – “I don’t, but sometimes it’s like I can’t escape it.” In mid-June, a video was posted on social media of her performing the junglist Nia Archives remix of Little Things – a single that has dovetailed with these hot recent weeks and is heading towards the Top 10 – and joy emanates from it as she winds through the song’s groove. But in the comments, she says: “There’s loads of talk about my weight, which is actually crazy. Because, right, I’m 26. I’m not 18. I’ve never ever been super-skinny – I’ve been slimmer, but I’ve also been younger, and a kid.”
She had already been feeling more aware of how her body has changed. “Coming into the campaign, I felt a bit like, I’ve been busy, I haven’t done as much gym. I am eating healthier, but I was chatting to some friends from school and saying that maybe I’ve gotten to that age where I put on weight a bit more easily now. Things change, don’t they, with your body?” She says she is hard on herself anyway: “I’m like, damn, I feel a bit insecure about it, and now people are commenting on it.” She smiles cheekily. “I have to think: ‘What are they going through?’ No one’s ever said anything in person, never. It’s very interesting.”
She feels more at ease “singing in the studio, jamming with my friends, recording …” She reconsiders. “I don’t actually like recording! More like being in the moment.” The women of DameDame* helped her feel comfortable enough to move away from the slow-jam tempo that typified her first album.
Falling or Flying is more adventurous, as you can already hear on Little Things and the earlier single, Try Me. The latter is a thundering chunk of syncopated bass drums, strings and crackly guitar, adorned with the various sounds of a cocking gun and percussion that rattles like jewellery. It is dramatic. Similarly uptempo tracks on the album pulse over bassy production, shoving you forward with more momentum than the teenage love songs Smith had put on to Lost & Found.
There are still a couple of reflective, if catchy, near-ballads that sound more like traditional R&B (plus an outing for some indie-poppy acoustic guitar). But Smith talks about how a greater sense of freedom defined this second album. She bedded in to write it, from late 2021 to the end of 2022, she says. “I started feeling more like myself again; like myself before any of this. Maybe because DameDame* are my friends, but also because I’m working with people who aren’t big names. It’s how I used to make music. Before. You know?”
That idea of the “before famous times” comes up often. One song was originally written about an old friend and, singing it to herself in the mirror at home, she realised she could apply it to her own life. She quotes a lyric to me: “‘They think that they know me here / But I know you know I haven’t quite been myself for years.’ So it’s like people see this person that’s on stage, who maybe seems a bit extroverted, not shy, a people pleaser, happy all the time, all these things. But I know,” she says, pointing at her chest, “that deep down I’m not that happy, don’t feel the most confident, quite insecure, find it hard to deal with loads of stuff that comes with the whole ‘Jorja Smith’ thing.”
She felt the glare of the public eye, which from time to time made her doubt herself. “Until I started working on this project, I felt like: I don’t know if I’m doing good or bad, I don’t know if I’m happy or sad, I don’t know if I’m winning or losing. I don’t know. It’s all a bit blurry, but somehow not.” Again – a person of extremes, who will talk about the intensity of her feelings like this, then be smiling a few sentences later. Any time she might have spiralled, it was temporary.
She likes to spend her time in Walsall being thoroughly normal and introverted: cooking, watching films, cleaning (which she says as if she is murmuring a secret) and reading (“Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams got me back into it”). Smith, who never wanted to be signed to a major label and still releases her records independently, now sits herself halfway between mega-fame and underground success, between red-carpet glamour and homely insularity.
In 2020, she says, “everything was moving so quick”. She found herself in relationships almost back-to-back, clocking now how that opened her up to being swayed in this or that direction. “It’s hard being with people who maybe want to tell you about yourself. Like, hold on a minute, I don’t even know how to be me quite yet either,” she says, chuckling. “Now, I’m … I’m actually all right. I don’t need to wake up with anyone’s opinions next to me in the morning, telling me: ‘Oh, maybe you should’ve worn this.’”
She won’t confirm whether she is single now, but jokes about once trying to send saucy texts to a guy: “Like: ‘I don’t know where you are, but I don’t wanna go to sleep.’” He didn’t reciprocate – “he was just being a gentleman!” – but at least inspired her enough to write the album’s title track. She feels lucky to have spoken to Adele, Stormzy and, recently, Alicia Keys about navigating celebrity because: “No one teaches you how to do it. There’s no handbook on fame, on this life. But I’m grateful for what I’m able to do because of this life. It’s just a weird one.”
She is about to be swept into hair and makeup for the shoot, and become “Jorja Smith” again. But first, she excitedly outlines her Friday-night plans: driving up to Walsall and getting a Chinese takeaway. She beams: “So I’m happy.”
English (US)